There you go again Josh. I was speaking specifically about alternative energy. That was also the subject of the Spanish analysis.Josh Cryer wrote:http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/ ... tales.html
Please read the link. I have heard of the 2 for 1 jobs argument but it is specious at best. The link illustrates it better than I could with a stuffy nose. :/
Now these guys focus on energy efficiency. But it figures you would quote some lefty organization probably in thrall to Big Wind and Big Solar. We will never know since their financing is secret.
Profit is a very powerful incentive. It keeps the drug war going despite massive government intervention.
I find it hard to believe that there is much to be gained from improvements in energy efficiency. If the government has to fund it it is probably an economic loss. Because - the search for profits is intense. So much so that people will violate laws to get them.
Take just one example: motor efficiency. There are some places where an inefficient motor is the right one. For instance: motors that start and stop a lot. Or motors that are on only a small portion of the time.
Efficient motors draw a LOT of current on start up. If for reasons of peak power you want to limit that then you have to add a special contactor. Which adds to the capital cost. If the motor is not running continuously then the higher efficiency (with its higher costs) plus the costs of the added contactor may not make economic sense. But our Congress in its infinite wisdom has taken the decision out of the hands of the people who would know best: engineers and accountants.
So let me give it to you straight. If it requires a government subsidy it is very likely a dead loss to the economy.
And what happens if we get a Tea Party Congress? (well enough to influence passage of bills) There goes your industry. Profit is a much better measure of usefulness than government backing.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... &offset=12
BRITAIN is not alone in fighting about green energy. Similar battles are being played out all over Europe. And the answer that emerges from each is that wind can provide only a fraction of the answer.
In southern Spain, fishermen from the ports of Barbate and Conil are determined to fight off a business consortium that wants to build a £3 billion wind farm in the shallow waters off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson on his column in Trafalgar Square would be dwarfed by the 500-plus turbines, each 460ft high.
Spain now has 405 wind farms, including the world’s largest at Tarifa. Yet the 1,745 megawatts generated serves only 175,000 of Spain’s 20m-plus homes.
Furthermore, the Spaniards have learnt that the fluctuating supply from wind farms can destabilise the whole grid. In March a combination of cold air and low winds sent demand for power soaring while wind farms ground to a halt. Spain’s power companies kept the nation’s lights on only by cutting voltages, a so-called brown-out, and disconnecting 300 industrial users.
Germany faces similar crises. Since Gerhard Schröder decided to phase out nuclear power the German government has been committed to expanding green energy. Germany today has more turbines than America — around 16,500 — with 1,201 added last year alone. Renewable energy now accounts for 9.3% of domestic energy consumption, and there are plans to expand this to 25% by 2025.
Yet all those windmills have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by only 2.5%, according to the German environment ministry.
The 2004 “wind report” from E.ON, one of Germany’s biggest producers of energy, explains why so much outlay has achieved so little. It points out that wind power is so unreliable that a power company can avoid blackouts only by keeping conventional power stations, with at least 50% of the capacity of its wind farms, on permanent standby. Wind power reaching the German grid in 2003 was just a sixth of the installed capacity.
Conversely, when the wind blows hard, the sudden power surge can burn out circuits and put the whole grid at risk. Such surges frequently threaten blackouts in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.
BTW are you a hard science engineer (electronics, aeronautics, buildings, bridges, power systems, nuclear engineering, etc.) or a soft science engineer (software)? The hard engineers have to be very careful because lives depend on getting it right. And no engineer I know is cavalier with the lives of other humans.
Because you seem weak in hard science engineering.
BTW I do hardware and software. And software is very prone to GIGO esp. when describing physical systems.
Example: when simulating circuits a good simulator is one that comes within 5% of the real world. An Excellent simulation might get to within 1%. In some cases.
What does that mean in terms of climate? Well 1% of 300K is 3K. Now in electronics - the physics is known to better than .01%. In climate the sign of the most important term is not even known. The feed back is not agreed on. And the system itself is chaotic. And you want me to give credence to the models where the input data is at best known to .3% (+/- 1 deg C) and the output data is supposed to be reliable to within the error of the input data 100 years hence? It strains credulity.
Well. As you have said. You are young and optimistic. Murphy has insufficiently kicked your @$$ as of yet. Give it time. Optimistic engineers do not last in hard engineering. Their bridges fail and their aircraft fall out of the sky.
“Physicists dream of Nobel prizes, engineers dream of mishaps.” Hendrik Tennekes
Do you lay awake at night dreaming of what might happen if your climate models are wrong? If we are headed for an ice age as opposed to a hot house? Cold is killing a lot of people this year. And expended cold in the Little Ice age lead to European famines and wars.